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President Obama’s speech tonight left your humble correspondent less than comforted; nothing new there. True, he acknowledged that the San Bernardino massacre was an act of terrorism, a conclusion he to which he was dragged kicking and screaming. He even acknowledged that the Fort Hood shootings by then Major, now Lt. Colonel (he got a promotion while in prison) Nidal Hasan was also an act of terrorism, which is a real shocker. Up to this point Hasan’s murderous rampage was officially labelled ‘workplace violence.’ He also dropped the claim that the motives for the husband and wife murder spree were completely unknown and unknowable; we are now told that it was motivated by an evil ideology that is a perversion of Islam. Essentially, this had nothing to do with REAL Islam.

He acknowledges that terrorism has changed. It has been forced to change because his policies have been so effective at breaking up large terrorist plots, reducing those infected by the evil, non Islamic ideology of hate to lone wolf operations.

No, seriously, he said that. No acknowledgement that his policies have fanned Jihadism from a dangerous fire into an out of control conflagration that has set the scene for World War III. Nope, it wasn’t him! Tacitly he’s blaming Bush, whose fault all this is, and will continue to be right up until the next Republican administration is sworn in.

But even though his Bizarro policies have been successful, his administration is taking steps to make them even more successful, by reviewing and tightening up the criteria for the K-1 Fiancee visa. That’ll do it for sure! No need to tighten up the criteria for visas for non matrimonial entrants from those parts of the world where the flame of Islam burns hot and wild. No need to impede the flow of gazillions of illegal immigrantsunregistered invadersundocumented Americans future Democratic voters flowing across our borders. No siree! On the contrary we gotta import hundreds of thousands of ‘refugees’ (tee hee!) from those benighted places, making sure that we get only the poor, peaceful Muslims while insuring the vile, bloodthirsty Christians remain trapped in the ISIS slaughterhouse. Of course America is not at war with Islam, even though a big chunk of Islam is at war with us.

But there are other important steps we as Americans can and must take in order to insure our safety. Namely, insuring that people on Do Not Fly lists are ineligible to buy guns! In fact, more ‘common sense’ gun laws must be enacted by Congress. Because assault weapons kill people! Guns don’t protect people. Only a government monopoly on guns can protect people. Like at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Trust government, not yourself.

We have to prevent a Muslim backlash, we must accept with open arms or Muslim friends, neighbors, military personnel and sports heroes. Aye, the same Muslim backlash about which we are continually warned but never see. In fact, we as Americans must welcome even more of these folks whose religious beliefs are at odds with what America is (or was, anyway) and who hold as a fundamental tenet of their faith that they must by any means necessary compel everybody to cave to their demands that they never perceive anything that might offend their religious hypersensitivities lest they explode in righteous Jihadist rage(TM). We must respect them even when they won’t respect us, our laws, our culture or our manner of life. This is, we are told, our American heritage.

No, dear reader, I am not comforted. Neither am I surprised. The transformation of America continues apace. I grew up in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I find myself living in the land of the bewildered and the home of the timorous.

Hope lives yet, but finds not its foundation in the President or any political movement. Hope lives because there are still men and women who believe in themselves, the principles of the Founding and who plead for Divine Favor. What the Progressives promise is a world radically at odds with reality, which cannot stand and which has demonstrated its failure everywhere it has ever been tried. I believe it was Winston Churchill who said something to the effect that America would always do the right thing, after having exhausted every other possibility. We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, now there is nowhere to go but up.

Every time Congress has taken a serious look at proposals to boost Internet sales taxes, it has rejected them. That’s probably why pro-tax Senators are trying to rush through an online tax hike with as little consideration as possible.

As early as Monday, the Senate will vote on a bill that was introduced only last Tuesday. The text of this legislation, which would fundamentally change interstate commerce, only became available on the Library of Congress website over the weekend. And you thought ObamaCare was jammed through Nancy Pelosi‘s Democratic House in a hurry.

. . .

Mr. Enzi’s Marketplace Fairness Act discriminates against Internet-based businesses by imposing burdens that it does not apply to brick-and-mortar companies. For the first time, online merchants would be forced to collect sales taxes for all of America’s estimated 9,600 state and local taxing authorities.

New Hampshire, for example, has no sales tax, but a Granite State Web merchant would be forced to collect and remit sales taxes to all the governments that do. Small online sellers will therefore have to comply with tax laws created by distant governments in which they have no representation, and in places where they consume no local services.

. . .

The drivers of this rush to tax are Wal-Mart and other big retailers that can more easily absorb the costs of collection than can smaller competitors. Also supporting the bill is Internet giant Amazon, which coincidentally now sells its own tax compliance service to other merchants. Adding to the lobbying muscle are state and local governments. The politicians believe they’ll collect tens of billions of dollars in taxes that are already owed by shoppers on remote sales but rarely paid.

So big business and big government are uniting to pursue their mutual interest in sticking it to the little guy. Any Internet seller with more than $1 million in annual sales would be forced to serve all of the nation’s tax collectors.

Which is pretty much what Adam Smith predicted in Wealth of Nations. I’m sure that the taxing agencies will collect more tax dollars, but at the expense of driving small internet based businesses out of business. I wonder if the added cost of government support for bankrupt business owners and employees is more or less than the projected increase in tax revenues, never mind the actual increase in revenues.

In the 1340’s Asia, India and the Middle East were swept by a great pestilence that reached Europe in 1347. From as single point of contact, the city of Genoa, the disease spread across Europe where it was known as the Black Death. It killed approximately 20,000,000 people, between 25 to 30 percent of the population. It nearly destroyed Western civilization, it did shatter its soul.

The disease was caused by a bacillus called Yersina pestis, transmitted by fleas, carried by rats and other mammals, including humans. At that time the germ theory of disease was still more than 500 years in the offing, people had no idea what what was causing it, still less how to control or remedy it. But because causation is built into the human mind, they started inventing causes: sin, Jews and witches being perennial favorites. Consumed by horror and terror, guided by ignorance and desperate conviction, they flailed about applying a wide variety of utterly useless cures and solutions to an evil they could not see, only name. Nothing worked. Nothing could work as all solutions were absolutely unconnected to the real causes. Thus ended the Medieval Christian civilization in Europe, it would be 100 years before the depleted and scarred descendants of the survivors would begin to rebuild, and when they did it was with a fearful eye cast back on the catastrophe that was the Black Death.

Like our distant ancestors, priest, peasant and noble alike, whose understanding was limited by their ignorance of the microbial world, our own incomprehension of the crippling ills that afflict our nation, culture and civilization are unknown to our intelligentsia, media and political elites. Political Correctness is the Yersinia pestis of our time, a mental parasite derived from Marxis pestis that has evolved and multiplied and spread widely through our civilization, culture and nation. Probably the most virulent strain is Alinskyis pestis whose most insidious symptom is that those infected by the disease are prevented by the disease from recognizing their own infection and the infection of others so afflicted.
Other symptoms are moral inversion, intolerance of common sense, rejection of the principles that created, elevated and sustained Western civilization, loathing of what is good, true and beautiful, tolerance for and championing of what is vile and destructive, a drive to capture and exercise despotic power by enslaving populations under their control through false compassion and dependency, a commitment to a monolithic diversity and an invariant propensity to call those who promise death and destruction ‘friend’ and those who promise amity and peace ‘enemy.’

Examples abound. We are no longer allowed to think of Islamists or militant Islam, references to which have been carefully purged from the FBI’s training manuals. Certainly it was not part of the lexicon when Major Nidal Hassan committed ‘workplace violence’ when he shot up Fort Hood while yelling “Allah akbar!” We are not allowed to say “illegal alien”, but must say “undocumented American.” That there are people who seriously believe this claptrap is hard for the sane to believe, but there are, and lots of them.

These are the people who hoped and prayed that the perpetrators of the Boston bombing would turn out to be “White Americans,” Tea Party members or some other right wing bête noir of the Loony Left, and were surprised and disappointed when reality set in. All the while there was no evidence that was the story, or rather, the narrative; they were free to broadcast their mental disease to the world, and once the facts killed the dream, well, on to the next one. But facts not withstanding, they continue to believe that right wing, Tea Party, Republican, white, gun toting, Bible thumping Americans are the problem.

For some, no amount of cognitive dissonance can break the hold the PC memes have on their minds. Some, yes, will be ‘mugged by reality,’ but because the indoctrination has been so pervasive for so long it takes an awful lot of reality moving very fast to make a dent. Left to itself any parasite will multiply until it consumes the host and both perish. Usually some hosts organisms survive this crash because they develop an immunity and pass that resistance on to their progeny; the species survives, though the majority of is members die. Our culture, saddled as it is with so many in positions of authority infected with Alinskyis pestis, is likely to experience such a crash. At that point the majority of survivors, having been slammed by implacable reality, will develop a belated immunity.

Margaret Thatcher’s granddaughter Amanda’s reading at Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral highlights the fact that we are at war, who and what the enemy is and who our allies really are. Whether Christian, Jew, agnostic or any other persuasion, the facts are the same. Alinskyis pestis has no medical, psychological or intellectual cure, for it is at root a spiritual disease and admits of only a spiritual cure. Whatever other tactics, weapons or means may be employed in its defeat, it is in the field of the Spirit that the battle rages, win or lose, the stakes for which we contend are precisely those of the soul.

This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois . And he is going to ‘fix’ Washington politics for us???

George Ryan is no longer Governor, he is in the big house. Of course he was replaced by Rob Blajegovitch who is…that’s right, also in the big house. And Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. resigned a few weeks ago. That is because he is fighting being sent to…that’s right, the big house.

The Land of Lincoln , where our governors make our license plates.

But you know what?

As long as they keep providing entitlements to the population of Chicago , nothing is going to change, except the state will go broke before the country does.

“Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.” — Henry Ford —

[T]he President’s apparatchiks squandered three full years during which they should have been hard at work preparing for the advent of these insurance “marketplaces.”

Not only has the go-live date for the insurance exchanges been pushed back a year, a wide variety of the law’s other key provisions have either been delayed or simply abandoned. The most conspicuous of the latter category was the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act. This program was so badly designed that Kathleen Sebelius admitted HHS couldn’t pay for it and one of its own administrators speculated that it might collapse. It was repealed in January.

Another moribund provision of Obamacare is the “Basic Health Plan,” included in the law to give states the flexibility to provide coverage for low-income residents unable to afford employer coverage or qualify for Medicaid.

Even the much-touted Obamacare provision that we were told would eliminate the “pre-existing condition” scourge is proving to be a bust. According the Heritage Foundation, the Obama Administration estimated that 375,000 people would enroll in the pre-existing conditions insurance plan (PCIP). “But as of January 2013, over two-and-a-half years since the plan began, only 107,139 were enrolled—less than 29 percent of original projections.” And yet the program is running out of money, forcing the HHS bureaucrats to suspend enrollment.

It hardly needs saying that this failure, like everything else associated with Obamacare, is incredibly expensive: “In a 2012 report, the Administration conceded that claims’ costs had been 2.5 times greater than they had anticipated.” This is of a piece with the “Affordable Care Act” in general. When Obamacare was first shoved down our throats, we were told that it would cost $898 billion. Now the projected cost is $1.6 trillion. Meanwhile, many of its taxes are now in effect and it is forcing health insurance premiums through the roof.

What we are left with, then, is a big-government vampire that will drain our personal and public coffers without delivering on its most important promises.

When increasing numbers of Socialist Democrat supporters of the bill are angry and disappointed with it and it’s implementation it is clear that what is needed is complete repeal. To all those who are now saying “I told you so,” yes you did.

There is indeed nothing new under the sun. This in nowhere more true than when speaking of human folly.

Kyrie eleison.

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Another compromise position, I guess. We won’t move as far left as the Democrats would like, we’ll just move a little to the left, for the 795th time. This is a bad habit of which they must be broken. They keep doing it because there are no adverse consequences. The only consequences are the grudging praise of the Leftist Propaganda Machine.

Race is a taboo subject – unless you are Black speaking to non-Blacks, Hispanic speaking to non-Hispanics, Asian speaking to non-Asians or a Democrat speaking to anyone at all. If you are not in any of the categories just mentioned, or worse, White, shut your pie hole and cast down your eyes because you, yes YOU, are a racist oppressor – by tautology.

The accusation of racism is a political cudgel used to discredit anyone not a member of these favored groups, an accusation which once made need never be proven and can never be disproved. The accusation itself comes complete with its own facts, its own judgement and its own sentence; it nullifies any defense, including any counter accusation for only the chosen non-categories above are entitled to make it. A white can never make the accusation of a non-white for if he does the stigma applies to him in the same way as if any non-white had made the accusation first. Because none of these favored non-white categories are, were or could ever be racist, which leads to the absurd but widely believed idea that race determines who can be racist.

Once the term ‘racism’ meant “a belief that human races have distinctive characteristics that determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.” The march of progress subsequently deleted the idea of culture from that definition and focused on only the most superficial physical characteristics; multiculturalism means that all cultures are equal, another patent absurdity. Finally in our own enlightened age the accusation of racism has come to mean, “You are committing thought crime by not repeating the approved politically correct nostrums and I don’t like it. Since I am unable to rationally and logically refute your points I will call you names until you either change you position and toe the PC party line (either because no such refutation is logically possible or because I don’t have the intellectual or rhetorical skills to do so), or I make you cry and you shut up and go home.” Strangely, this is not bullying, but that is one of the new rules of racism.

Nor should it go unremarked that there is no little irony that the accusation of racism is almost exclusively a weapon used by the Democratic Party, which supported enslaving the blacks and opposed the abolitionists, to blacken the Republican Party which was founded by abolitionists and successfully prosecuted a policy of racial equality. The Left has brought about a world of Orwellian moral inversion, which deserves examination at another time.

Racism, real racism, not the political weapon masquerading as racism, is alive and well in the United States. It is growing, in no small part precisely because it has been used as a political weapon. The Left and the Democratic Party have sought and successfully obtained political advantage by inflaming racial passions. By so doing it has set before the victims their own policies have created, abetted and enlarged the idea that their troubles were rather the result of racist enmity by the Democrats’ political enemies. It has pounded that drum unceasingly, has created a whole race baiting industry proclaim racial blame from the rooftops, has relentlessly fanned the flames of racial discord, it has protected and bankrolled the race mongers, it has hysterically marketed such white-on-anybody-that’s-not-white violence as it can find to both further diminish the self confidence of the racially neutral and inflame the rage of the victim’s racial group and finally it has hidden the racial violence that it has fomented.

That racial violence has increased to the point where it can no longer be successfully contained or covered up, though it is not yet widely known. Divide and conquer has become divide and destroy. The problem has become so great, in my opinion, that a simple political fix is no longer possible. It is not yet politically possible to even talk about this openly, much less devise and implement a solution. It may be that it will never be possible to openly discuss this before an explosion creates such fear and animosity that discussion is not possible.

One of the great unpalatable and therefore seldom mentioned truths is that responsibility is with the one who sees. Knowledge is power, but only if acted upon. Here responsibility is distinguished from mere blaming, which is the antithesis of responsibility. There is a tendency in the perceived absence of viable solutions to avoid opening cans of worms, especially when it is well known that blame will be leveled both for opening the can and for the existence of the worms. Still, the discussion must be opened, and done in such a way that there is accountability, correct understanding of the problem and many minds working together to devise and implement workable solutions on many fronts.

Will the Republican Party, with its noble tradition of racial equality, be equal to the task before it? How should we begin? Your ideas solicited in the comments.